


When the River Runs Free

by burglebezzlement



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Cleaning, Earp Homestead, Earp family campfire, Family, Gen, Sisters, bad memories, well drilling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-19
Updated: 2016-04-19
Packaged: 2018-06-03 07:31:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6602164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burglebezzlement/pseuds/burglebezzlement
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wynonna Earp doesn't want to move back to a homestead with no running water and a lifetime’s supply of bad memories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the River Runs Free

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Set between Ep 2 and Ep 3.

It’s early afternoon in the Sherif’s office, and Dolls is ignoring Wynonna. 

“Why won’t you run the background check?”

Wynonna tries out her most imploring expression. Unfortunately, Dolls is immune. “It’s a waste of resources.”

“Excuse you,” Wynonna says. “Water is important. We need water.”

“You can buy water,” Dolls says.

“We can buy drinking water. We cannot buy running water. For running water, we need a well. A well that isn’t dry.”

“So deal with it.” Dolls doesn’t look up from his paperwork. “I’m not running a background check on the local dowser.”

“Water witch.” Wynonna pushes back onto the table. “Look, Waverly says the well driller won’t come out without him.”

“So find another well driller.”

“Have you looked at this town?” Wynonna waves her hand around Dolls’ commandeered office. The frosted glass in the windows is yellowed and one pane is cracked. The air smells like stale donut. “We’re lucky we have one water witch.”

“So use the water witch.” 

Also — this is the part Wynonna isn’t telling Dolls — there’s a question about whether their water rights were abandoned when the last fragments of the Earp family left the homestead. So maybe there’s only one well driller who’s willing to come out and drill the well and also look the other way on the paperwork that’s supposed to go to the state. 

Dolls wouldn’t understand. He’s probably from some place out East, where water runs as freely as revenants spill blood, and water rights aren’t even a thing. 

He looks up at her. “You’re wasting my time, Deputy.”

“Yeah.” Wynonna slams her hand into the table. “Right. Speaking of that, do I get paid for being a Deputy?”

* * *

Three hours, eighteen pages, one background check, and a new errand later, Wynonna has the promise of maybe getting paid. The errand in question is visiting a bank to start an account. Because apparently the Black Badge Division only pays by Direct Deposit, which seems wrong to Wynonna, but what does she know about secret government agencies.

As long as they pay her. And then she can pay the water witch and the well driller, maybe, if she decides they’re safe to allow onto the property. 

They need the damn water.

To be more accurate, Waverly needs the water. If you’re building a fortress to keep your little sister safe, you need her to stay there. And Waverly is much more likely to stay if she has the basics. Electricity (covered, between the lines from town and the generator). Cell service. Water.

Two of out three means that if someone cuts them off, they’re trapped. They’re only safe as long as the water holds out.

But when you just spent a frantic afternoon of darkness digging for something that destroyed the safety of the only home you ever knew, it’s a little hard to trust someone coming on your property to dig again.

* * *

People are being supportive of their move out to the homestead. Gus gave them a set of chairs. Creepy Henry the Earp-fan put up the mailbox, and Shorty let Waverly rummage through the bar’s collection of cleaning materials.

Unfortunately, buckets don’t do much good unless you’ve got water to put in them. When Wynonna gets home that night, Waverly’s in the kitchen, scrubbing down the floor with — what is that?

“Hey, sis!” Waverly’s beaming like it’s totally normal to be camped out in a house encrusted in dust and bad memories.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Waverly grins and points to the corner of the room. “Cleaning supplies.”

There’s a case of Lysol wipes, and a case of bottled water, and a box of trash bags. “Right.” Wynonna snags a trash bag. She decides not to tell Waverly that she should have started from the top down. The greasy dust encrusted on the kitchen cabinets is just going to get the floor dirty again.

Whatever. Once they get a well running, they can mop down the floor with as much water as they want.

She spends the next two hours pulling seriously expired food and kitchen crap out of the cabinets, sorting out the good kitchen crap from the bad kitchen crap, filling trash bags and hurling them into the back of the truck. Shorty won’t mind if she fills his Dumpster the next morning.

* * *

Wynonna cleaned Waverly’s room first, mopping it down with damp rags and water from 1-gallon jugs that used to hold milk for Shorty’s coffee customers. It’s the smallest room on the second floor, and it was Waverly’s room back when they lived there as kids.

It also has the only bed they own. Waverly bought it from a thrift store over Wynonna’s objections. From her years bumming around sketchy hostels in Europe, Wynonna has seen pretty much every level of bed bug infestation, but Waverly claims bed bugs haven’t made it to Purgatory yet. (Or maybe they’re avoiding the place.)

The other two rooms on the second floor are their parents’ old room, and the room Wynonna used to share with Willa. Wynonna isn’t interested in moving into either of those, so she sleeps on the first floor, in a sleeping bag.

* * *

She’s been avoiding the past all day, so it just figures that her dreams decide to lead her down Memory Lane.

In the dream, she and Willa are playing Heir and Revenant. Waverly’s just a baby, upstairs in her crib in the room that was called a sewing room long after everyone stopped sewing.

Wynonna’s watching from the outside in this memory. The kid version of herself is so tiny — a wiry kid with long pigtails that she remembers her mom insisting on. “You’re not neat, like Willa,” her mom would say, pulling the hair as she braided it until tears sprang up in Wynonna’s eyes. “We can’t trust you with loose hair.”

In her dream, the kid version of herself is twisting one of the pigtails around her hand. “I don’t want to be a revenant this time.”

“You have to,” Willa says, older-sister bossy. “I’m the heir. That means you’re the revenant.”

It’s raining outside the homestead’s windows, which explains why Mom didn’t kick them outside like usual before going upstairs with her headache. 

“I wanna be the heir,” kid-Wynonna says. 

“Well, you’re not.”

“But it’s not fair.” Kid-Wynonna stamps her feet. “It’s never me, why is it never me?”

“Because you’re _not_ ,” Willa says. Like it’s only right. Like there’s nothing she can do to change fate. 

Observer-Wynonna stands by the banister that Waverly wiped down with Lysol wipes that morning, watching her younger self fight for it.

She never really wanted to be the heir. What she wanted was something different — the right to play the hero in one of their endless games of Heir versus Revenant. For her dad to take the time to teach her things, to take the kind of time with her that he spent with Willa. For Mom to trust her, just sometimes.

* * *

The next morning, they get up and head over to Shorty’s, where Wynonna uses Champ’s shower. She comes out to find the blowdryer and finds Champ hanging all over her little sister, who’s apparently chosen to forgive him for bringing some strange woman up to their room.

Another reason for bringing back the water: Showers. In a bathroom that doesn’t still have random-ass feathers hanging around from her little sister’s fondness for shooting up pillows. 

During another endless strategy session-slash-interrogation with Dolls later that day, she finds a feather stuck in her hair. It’s a final feather. A last straw.

* * *

Wynonna insists on being there when the well-driller comes. She ends up showing them around the 10 acres while the water witch swings his little metal rods and looks for water.

She tries to pay them with one of her fancy new checks from her starter-pack, hoping her pay from the Black Badge Division will come through before they cash it. But they insist on cash, which means she needs to use the last of Gus’s birthday gift. Paying for a well so Wynonna can stay at the family homestead is kind of the last thing Gus was going for there. 

At least it’s still something to keep Waverly safe.

The new well’s a metal pipe sticking out of the ground with a blue plastic cover on it. No chance of throwing a gun down this one.

And now they are one plumber away from getting water inside the house — one plumber and maybe a hot water heater, maybe some new fixtures, which means Wynonna’s still waiting on her damn paycheck. The place is still beat to hell and back, but it’s the only possible safe refuge. Wynonna’s going to take it.

* * *

Wynonna spends that night in the downstairs bathroom with a bottle of something and half a case of Lysol wipes, removing dirt from the dry fixtures and the dusty floor one square of chemical-soaked fabric at a time. When Waverly gets home after last call, the place is about as sparkling as you could hope for.

“It looks good,” Waverly says, standing in the doorway. 

“Hey.” Wynonna rocks back on her heels. She’s at least five-eights drunk already. “How did you get back?”

“Champ drove me.”

“Right.” 

They need to get Waverly her own wheels. As much as Wynonna’d like to princess-in-the-tower her little sister and strand her out here, where it’s safe, Waverly’s not likely to put up with that.

“He didn’t want to stay,” Waverly says. “I think he’s still scared of you.”

“Good.” Wynonna keeps scrubbing at a bit of tile that’s probably as clean as it’s ever going to be. “He should be.”

Waverly looks down at her. “So… are you going to squat in the bathroom all night, or do you want to come out to the fire?”

Outside, it’s getting cold unless you’re wrapped up in a blanket, sitting right by the fire next to your sister. Wynonna shuts her eyes and tries not to think about revenants. Focuses on the smell of woodsmoke in the cool air.

“I envy you,” Waverly says, finally, when the fire’s dying down.

“Really?” 

“You got to have good memories here,” Waverly says. 

“Not many of them.” Wynonna doesn’t look back towards the windows of the house, where the seven came through and shattered their entire life. “The bad ones kind of drown the rest out.”

“Yeah, well.” Waverly’s staring into the coals. “Every time I go up to that stupid bedroom, I remember Mom screaming at Dad in the next room.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“What, that they fought? How could you miss it?”

“That you remembered that much of it.”

“I’m glad you’re back,” Waverly says. “I think now we get to make new memories here.”

It’s exactly the sort of thing Waverly would think, and Wynonna is blown away, again, by how forgiving her sister is. She can forgive a big sister who shot their dad in the back. An Heir who ran off to Europe and left her little sister with a town of weirdos who somehow still manage to ignore the demons living in their midst. 

If Willa and Dad had lived, Waverly would have forgiven them too. 

“We’re going to get water,” Wynonna says. She didn’t even tell Waverly about the well before. Maybe she’ll save it for a surprise, once she’s found a plumber she can trust and the place has been properly hooked up.

“Yeah?” Waverly grins. “Awesome.”

Yeah. Water — hot water even. Maybe they’ll get the kitchen cleaned up enough that you could cook there. Wynonna saw Waverly’s little kitchenette — somebody obviously cooks there, and no way that somebody is Champ. No more living on Dolls’ donuts and food from the “get it before it expires” shelf in Shorty’s walk-in. 

They can put down, like, carpet or something. Slap paint over the entire place. Exorcise the bad memories along with the demons.

“Yeah,” Wynonna says, tilting her head back to look up at the stars.

They’re going to make this into a place to make a stand.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Dire Straits, Water of Love
> 
>   _Water of love, deep in the ground_  
>  _But there ain't no water here to be found_  
>  _Some day, baby, when the river runs free_  
>  _It's gonna carry that water of love to me_


End file.
